OSSR: The Riddle of Steel (and successors)

[angelfromanotherpin]

I. The Riddle of Steel

This big bad hardback dropped in 2002, bearing the dubious distinction of being 'the only RPG approved by the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts'. My gaming group tried it out a couple of times, and it wasn't all bad. Just mostly.

Book Zero
This book calls its chapters 'books' for some reason. Possibly because old-timey books were bullshit small and they wanted to give the impression that this was several old-timey books collected into one volume? One of the selling points on the back was about how this was a self-contained game that wasn't divided into e.g. PHB and DMG for scamming's sake, so maybe they wanted to make you feel like you got eight books' worth for your money? This section isn't actually called Book Zero, I'm just using that to designate all the stuff before Book One starts.

Page 1 reiterates the title and also has a section I want you to read:

Since the dawning of time, when Triumph the Forger-God pounded out the world from the mists and ores of heaven, men have sought the Riddle of Steel.

Few have found it.

What is it?

It is invincibility – to strike with all and to be struck by none.

It is understanding – to ask questions and to know the answers.

It is peace – to walk without fear, to know that the end is in your own hands.

It is skill – to feel the elegance found in violence, and to know the beauty found in stillness.

It is Spirit – to gaze into the face of your God and to know him before he comes for you.

What is the Riddle of Steel? Where is it found?

That is the question with no answer.

That's right, the question with no answer is two questions, one of which has several answers that you just read. I know it's meant to be Zen, but probably not by way of being entirely up its own butt.

For all that it's the title of the game and a big deal is made out of it on the very first page, the Riddle plays a very small part in the actual game. It's a setting element in the default world, a form of enlightenment to be pursued (but probably never attained) that you'd put on your character sheet next to 'Religion:' if you wanted the GM – sorry, I mean Seneschal – to be able to give you an instant plot hook to any location by saying there were Riddle-rumors there. It's also definitely a shout-out to the old Conan movie, and more substantively than just a quote – but we'll get to that later.

Page 2 is the credits. There's one creator/writer (Jacob Norwood) with 'additional writing' added by seven other people, one of whom also designed the magic system, and two of whom also did the editing. There are eight named playtesters, but he also credits 'all the guys in Seattle, Texas, Tennessee, and everywhere else', so it seems like testing got farmed out to a number of other tables, which is better than some small press RPGs manage.

Page 3 is a drawing of a top-down view of an armored man holding a bloody sword high in a gauntleted hand while standing on a pile of skulls, and it seems like the least impactful angle to see such a scene from, if pretty easy to draw.

Pages 4-5 are the contents pages, and I'll leave you with the chapter titles as a teaser of where we're going.

Book One: In the Beginning
Book Two: The Birth of a Legend?
Book Three: Training
Book Four: The Codex of Battle
Book Five: The Laws of Nature
Book Six: Sorcery 101
Book Seven: The World of Weyrth
Book Eight: The Seneschal
Appendices

[Thaluikhain]

Putting aside that "The Riddle of Steel" (or "The R DD E of S EEL") is something of a cringable name, "Roleplaying with an edge"? Yeah, that seems like it'd encourage not giving the book a second look.

[WiserOdin032402]

if you wanted the GM – sorry, I mean Seneschal

Oh cool we're renaming the GM/DM right off the bat. That's not gonna stick. It never does.

Why do games do that, by the by?

[OgreBattle]

Why do games do that, by the by?

I like the idea, it kinda indicates that different games have different classes/jobs of game master. One of the Den games has "Master of Ceremonies, Emcee" to emphasize that the role is to host a fun experience and not be a bondage queen punishing gimp PC's.

Riddle of Steel was my introduction to a lot of real sword fighting concepts, years later I found a longsword club and kendo club to practice. I forget if it's before or after Sirlin's Yomi but they have a similar vibe with 1 on 1 combat.

I'll talk more when the relevant sections on combat come up... also wondering how terrain dice were suppose to work

[maglag]

if you wanted the GM – sorry, I mean Seneschal

Oh cool we're renaming the GM/DM right off the bat. That's not gonna stick. It never does.

Why do games do that, by the by?

For the same reason many mecha shows create new fancy names for their giant robots. They're not trying to make it stick for everybody, quite in the contrary they're trying to create a more distinct identity to stand out from the crowd.

[Username17]

if you wanted the GM – sorry, I mean Seneschal

Oh cool we're renaming the GM/DM right off the bat. That's not gonna stick. It never does.

Why do games do that, by the by?

In Vampire, the DM is called the Storyteller and the Party is called the Coterie.
In Shadowrun, the DM is called the GM and the Party is called the Team.

Those stick. Indeed, one of the first things that a game designer has to do: to convey to the players what hey are calling the players. And that very much includes the DM role, as the player behind the screen is a player of the game and the one most likely to be referenced individually (for obvious reasons).

I rag on Nightlife for a lot of things, but calling the DM a 'CP' (standing for 'City Planner') is pretty inspired when the other players are called 'PC' (standing for 'Player Character'). Lots of these terminologies are unworkable trash, but that doesn't mean that it isn't important to grapple with the concept. You're playing a game that is also a cooperative storytelling endeavor with dice but also an open ended content generation, existential and identity questions aren't just important, they are the most important.

I'm never calling the DM 'Seneschal' because that's dumb. But questions and propositions about what role the DM fills in the game are important to entertain when making a game.

-Username17

[souran]

Riddle of Steel is almost more interesting as a synthesis of old school fencing manuals than it is a game.

When I was in college I did intramural fencing through my University. Our "Coach" was a student getting their masters in business administration that had been fencing since they were a kid and took the job because it was $500 a month for 2 nights a week doing something he liked to do anyway. Additionally, the student rec center did pay for him to go get training at the US Olympic Fencing training center so its not like he was totally clueless.

However, he loved ROS because understanding technical fencing was actually better than having good numbers on your character sheet. ROS combat takes FOREVER because it proceeds basically one swing (pass) at a time. So if you understood the mechanics of real world fencing you were very very good at combat in ROS.

While unique, this is also stupid. Allowing real world knowledge to dominate an RPG is a bad choice for a number of reasons, chief among them that if you are bringing your real world TECHNICAL knowledge to the game you are not exactly role playing anything...

[angelfromanotherpin]

Putting aside that "The Riddle of Steel" (or "The R DD E of S EEL") is something of a cringable name, "Roleplaying with an edge"? Yeah, that seems like it'd encourage not giving the book a second look.

What's weird is how edgy it isn't. There's no particularly transgressive content, nor even any Privateer Press 'play like you've got a pair' prose stylings. I get the feeling they were trying to connect with the White Wolf crowd with the tagline, and hoping they'd stay for the... historically-accurate combat? Indie RPGs rarely have marketing consultants, so it's not surprising that they make some baffling decisions. It seems like the creator used his playtests to spread word-of-mouth, which is probably the biggest reason why the game is at all known.

As far as Seneschal et al, yeah, a lot of RPGs just rename their terms for branding purposes, or even just because other games the author liked did it. Done thoughtfully, it can be good communication of expectations. Done rando-ly, it accomplishes nothing (but usually not worse than nothing because useless terms just get discarded).

[souran]

Putting aside that "The Riddle of Steel" (or "The R DD E of S EEL") is something of a cringable name, "Roleplaying with an edge"? Yeah, that seems like it'd encourage not giving the book a second look.

The Riddle of Steel is not a concept that the author's of this game first developed. Hell, the first time I heard of "The Riddle of Steel" metaphor was when I was 7 and saw "Conan the Barbarian" for the first time. I later found that Robert E. Howard does occasionally use this phrase in a couple of stories (it appears in hour of the dragon) and he stole it older sources like he did pretty much everything. It's my understanding that "The riddle of Steel" used as a poetic term for understanding how to kill people with swords efficiently without getting killed in return appears in a couple of Renaissance era fighting manuals, and thus probably originated before that possibly in the late medieval period.


If you wanted your warrior types to be able to get so good at stabbing they became magical stabbers attaching a layer of mystic zen over everything might not be a bad idea. If your fighter types are all "disciples of the riddle of steel" or "seeking the answer to the riddle of steel" that gives you a framework where yeah most people never get good enough at stabbing to where they can threaten the wind to fly them places but your dark brooding swordmasters can because reasons.

[Thaluikhain]

Putting aside that "The Riddle of Steel" (or "The R DD E of S EEL") is something of a cringable name, "Roleplaying with an edge"? Yeah, that seems like it'd encourage not giving the book a second look.

The Riddle of Steel is not a concept that the author's of this game first developed. Hell, the first time I heard of "The Riddle of Steel" metaphor was when I was 7 and saw "Conan the Barbarian" for the first time. I later found that Robert E. Howard does occasionally use this phrase in a couple of stories (it appears in hour of the dragon) and he stole it older sources like he did pretty much everything. It's my understanding that "The riddle of Steel" used as a poetic term for understanding how to kill people with swords efficiently without getting killed in return appears in a couple of Renaissance era fighting manuals, and thus probably originated before that possibly in the late medieval period.


If you wanted your warrior types to be able to get so good at stabbing they became magical stabbers attaching a layer of mystic zen over everything might not be a bad idea. If your fighter types are all "disciples of the riddle of steel" or "seeking the answer to the riddle of steel" that gives you a framework where yeah most people never get good enough at stabbing to where they can threaten the wind to fly them places but your dark brooding swordmasters can because reasons.

Aren't most people going to associate it with pretentious waffle in an Arnie movie, though, regardless of its roots? Like you, that was when I first came across that term, I imagine it's the same for a great many people. I doubt many people would rate it as a better phrase from an Arnie film, nor one of the most profound.

[Whatever]

Putting aside that "The Riddle of Steel" (or "The R DD E of S EEL") is something of a cringable name, "Roleplaying with an edge"? Yeah, that seems like it'd encourage not giving the book a second look.

What's weird is how edgy it isn't.

I feel like the entire thought process there was "swords have an edge lol"

[angelfromanotherpin]

Book One: In the Beginning



The book opens with a forgettable flash-fiction, a what-is-an-RPG section, and a what-kind-of-RPG-is-this-one section. That third one bears some examination.

The author claims that his game is 'special' and also 'unusual' because it rejects the artificial restrictions of levels and classes, and I would like to welcome him to the cutting edge of 1977 RPG design only twenty-five years late. Outside of his time-lacuna, White Wolf had dominated the market with its skill-based system for a decade. The weird thing is that the game mechanics (which we will get to) are closely modeled on Shadowrun, so the dude had to know he was talking out of his ass. I can only assume it was just marketing drivel.

We also get some talk about how the setting is 'more real, more dangerous, and more exciting, than perhaps what you'll find in any other RPG...' That 'perhaps' is doing a heavy lift. The intention is plainly but not explicitly sword-and-sorcery rather than conventional high fantasy. Somewhere in there we get a spiel about how starting PCs are 'not "average" at all.' I bring this up only because it'll be good for a cynical chuckle when we get to character creation.

---

The basic die mechanic is Shadowrun with d10s, except that your die pool isn't Stat+Skill, it's just Stat. There are two difficulty tables, and the first one is troubling.

You can get results > 10 because 10's explode, but I think they're understating how harsh TNs of 11+ are given that your Stat is 8 at most.

The weird thing is that this is the first and presumably default difficulty table, and yet it's not at all clear when you're supposed to use it ever. In combat, your weapon has its own TN. Out of combat, you're typically rolling against your skill value (lower being better), examples of which are the second difficulty table.


The example of an action that references Table 1.1 is a dude diving through an opening before it's blocked by a rockfall, but there's an Acrobatics skill that would seem to apply, so who knows? There's a similar example later on that seems to ignore the existence of the Persuasion skill.

There is a fumble mechanic, and it requires no successes and two or more 1s on a roll to proc. That's more reasonable than many versions of this system, but I think there are still breakpoints where having more dice makes you more likely to botch, which is amateurish.

---

The last part of this chapter introduces the Attributes, which is a little weird because all the other 'things-that-go-on-a-character-sheet' don't get expounded upon until chapter Book Three.

The first thing that stands out is that the physical stats are Strength, Agility, and then the three pieces that they sawed Constitution into: Toughness, Endurance, and Health. So being generally hardy is expensive as hell, which is weird because it really seems like a sucker's game compared to being fast and accurate. At a guess, it has to do with the whole 'dangerous world' thing because it's hard to cover your bets against all of injury, fatigue, and poison.

I now skip over the unremarkable mental stats to get to the meat: the Spiritual Attributes, which I think are the real innovation of this game, although it's possible that they aren't. Wikipedia tells me that RoS was heavily influenced by a Polish historical RPG called Dzikie Pola, which I can't get a copy of and couldn't read if I did, so if the author adapted them from that game, I'd never know. Certainly I'd never seen them before.


My poster children for Spiritual Attributes.

Personality mechanics are pretty old. For example, Pendragon has a ton of them, and you have to roll Chastity to not sleep with Morgan le Fay. But these were traditionally very self-contained, interacting chiefly with themselves. RoS made their personality mechanics interact with every part of the game.

SpirAtts work like this: every player picks 5 things that their character cares most about. They are broadly divided with tags like Conscience, Passion, Destiny, and so on, but are highly customizable. When you take significant action to pursue one of those things, you get points in it (to a max of 5). When you make a roll appropriate to one (or more) of those things, you add their rating to your dice pool. And they are also your advancement currency, being spent to make your numbers go up (or down, for skills).

While the system has some unfortunate exploits, considered as a rough draft, it's really good. Players get to choose their own goals, and get increased effectiveness and also xp for pursuing them. It's very player-empowering and RP-positive. It also ties back to the title of the game, because in the '82 Conan movie, the answer to the Riddle of Steel is that the ultimate power is human motivation and will. It's probably the single best piece of design between the covers, and it deserved a better game than this.

Next Up: Character Creation

[Username17]

Shadowrun with d10s and Target Numbers that go up past 20 sounds an awful lot like 1st edition Vampire: the Masquerade.

In any case, the really salient feature of exploding dice and variable target numbers is that your chances of getting "crazy extreme" results are low but not astoundingly low. Every die has a 0.9% chance of beating a target number of 22. That's quite low for an individual attempt - a maximum dice pool of 8 dice succeeds less than 7% of the time. But if you set a bunch of random 2-die peasants or children to try their best, you'd only need 56 for one of them on average to succeed.

It's the almost literal opposite of what you'd want an RPG random number generator to provide. The greatest heroes are only contributing as much as 3 or 4 randos. Player characters fail at heroic actions constantly, but those heroic actions aren't difficult enough that they aren't happening every day somewhere in town.

-Username17

[Username17]

There is a fumble mechanic, and it requires no successes and two or more 1s on a roll to proc. That's more reasonable than many versions of this system, but I think there are still breakpoints where having more dice makes you more likely to botch, which is amateurish.

And how!

So to start off with here's the chances of getting two or more 1s:

Dice	Chance
1	0.0%
2	1.0%
3	2.8%
4	5.2%
5	8.2%
6	11.4%
7	15.0%
8	18.7%

So your chances of hitting the magic double 1 threshold goes up from one in a hundred at 2 dice to nearly one in five at 8 dice. The next thing to check is what percentage of those double ones are negated by at least one of the other dice being a success. That ranges from zero at two dice to... some other number depending on target number at any other number of dice.

But the easiest to check of course is 3 dice. When you roll 2 ones (which you do 2.8% of the time), the third die will negate the botch an amount of the time equal to 3*(X)/28 where X is the number of numbers a single die succeeds on. That is, at TN5 you get results with two 1s and at least one 5+ on 64.3% of throws that have at least two 1s. That's coincidentally the equivalency point where 3 dice gives the same botch percentage as 2 dice. At TNs 6+, the amount of botches is simply higher at 3 dice than at 2. For example, at 'Proficient' (TN 7+) your chance of botching on 2 dice is 1% and your chance of botching on 3 dice is 1.6%.

Breakeven points are of course slightly different for different numbers of dice. But a consistent theme is that for skill ratings of Proficient or worse you botch chance is generally higher if you roll more dice. Actual combinatorials are an absolutely beast to calculate of course since you're tracking combinations involving three distinct die states. But you get the idea.

-Username17

[Username17]

I figured out how to get anydice to output this information, which makes it so much faster. Anyway, here you are:

Dice	TN 7+	TN 8+
1	0.0%	0.0%
2	1.0%	1.0%
3	1.6%	1.9%
4	1.71%	2.41%
5	1.53%	2.55%
6	1.23%	2.43%
7	0.92%	2.17%
8	0.66%	1.85%

The lower the target number the lower the dice pool where adding a die reduces instead of increases your botch chance. But for target numbers 8+, all allowed dicepools of more than 2 dice have a higher botch chance than dicepools of 2 dice.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Book 2: The Birth of a Legend



Character creation is priority-based. There are six categories, you rank them A-to-F, we've seen this sort of thing before. I think it's a perfectly reasonable format, but this implementation has issues. I'm tempted to just say that it's not very good and move on, but if I don't do an excruciating deep dive into this, who will?

Priority	Race & Sorcery	Social Class	Attributes	Skills	Proficiencies (& Vagaries)	Gifts/Flaws
A	Fey or Sorcery-using Sidhe	Landed Nobility	47	6/6	14	2 Major Gifts
B	Non-magical Sidhe Gifted Human Gifted Halfling	Landless Nobility	43	6/7	9	1 Major Gift
C	Non-magical Halfling	High Freeman	39	7/7	6	1 Major Gift 1 minor flaw
D	Human	Low Freeman	35	8/8	4	1 minor gift 1 minor flaw (or none)
E	Human	Peasant	31	9/9	2	1 Major Flaw 1 minor gift
F	Human	Prisoner or Slave	27	9	0	1 Major Flaw 1 minor flaw

Race & Sorcery
You'll notice that the bottom three priorities in R&S are exactly the same 'just a person' thing, and while the D and E priorities are a negative possibility space, it's not a big deal. For most concepts, Race is an 'easy F,' to dump your lowest priority into, and that's fine, certainly preferable to some version of D being übermensch and F being untermensch. Although what we get instead is uncomfortably close to that.

If your race is human, you have to pick a Nationality, from a variety of ersatz versions of real-world peoples in the Howardian tradtion. These come with mechanical baggage including stat modifiers, and some are just cold better than others. For example, the people of Ahr have -1 Health, while the people of Helena have +1 Social and a free art, craft, or language skill. The only saving grace is that the various bennies/downers are the result of nurture as well as nature, and you could maybe lean into the former and read the modifiers as cultural. It's not great, and the imbalance is also poor design.

I'm not going to go through all the nationalities to see how they conform to various real-world stereotypes, life's too short. Moving on to the fantasy stuff.

---

'Halfling' in this setting means being half fairy. Being a nonmagical halfling is bullshit, because what you get is +1 Perception or Wits, and either Sneak or Ridicule at Skill 8. That's not better than what you get for being one of the advantaged nationalities of human! And it might come with a highly-distinctive appearance like being a blue-skinned bat-eared dwarf, which is going to make life more awkward for you, especially if you're some sort of adventurer who engages in acts of varying legality and would prefer to be inconspicuous. It's a whole lot of nothing that you pay a very high price for.

(To compound the error, in the RoS Companion book, it was suggested that people could pick D or E Race/Sorcery to be humans with some minor magical talent – an example was an E-rank human who was immune to poisons – which made D/E-rank humans both better and more magical than C-rank half-fairies.)

At B-Rank, we have Gifted Humans, Gifted Halflings, and non-magical Sidhe. 'Gifted' means 'can use sorcery,' which is broken as hell, but at least this rank recognizes that being a halfling isn't worth more than being a human. What do you get for being a full-blooded but non-Sorcerous fairy? The shaft. The only example of such is 'Rock Dwarves,' whose package is +2 Strength or Toughness, -1 Social, a Craft Skill at 6, and the minor flaw Little. Once again, that's not particularly better than being human.

At A-Rank, we have the magic-using sidhe (and the Fey, who are a kind of magic-using sidhe). Seelie get +2 Wits, -1 Willpower, Ridicule at Skill 9, access to the sorcery rules, and +2 in a specific Vagary (sorcery school). Unseelie get the same, except their Ridicule skill is at 6 and they have to take the Bad Temper flaw. The Fey get +1 Agility, Wits, and Perception, -2 Mental Affinity, Sneak at Skill 7, and the same sorcery with 2 Vagary points. So outside of the sorcery, the racial modifiers are the same 'Net +1 stat, Skill' that you get for being a nonmagic sidhe, a halfling, or just an advantaged human. So for going from B-Rank to A-Rank, you got +2 Vagary points. But you also get (at least) +2 Vagary points for putting a higher priority into your Proficiencies & Vagaries pick, so what the hell?

I have two hypotheses as to how this travesty made it through even rudimentary playtesting.
Hypothesis One is that it didn't. The playtest docs went out without any fairy stuff in them and leaned real hard into the sword-and-sorcery trope where the nonhumans are either so close to human as to be indistinguishable (like Moorcock's Melniboneans) or so divergent as to be monsters. The fairy stuff was then added as an afterthought, and a minimal one at that.
Hypothesis Two is that the fairy race options are deliberately overpriced/underpowered to encourage people to play humans, and were only included at all as a pacifier for that portion of the RPG market who really like nonhuman races.


That was kind of a lot, I'll do the rest of chargen in a second post.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Chargen: The Rest
Everything else that's wrong with this character creation system can be boiled down to two simple categories.

Category 1: You Suck
The intro made a big deal about how starting characters were 'not average at all' but instead 'mighty, powerful, dangerous, crafty, or talented,' and 'exceptional.' And it's kind of true, but it's rarely going to feel true. Also, that 'or' is doing a heavy lift.

This is most obvious in the Attributes. You have ten non-spiritual attributes, and the human average in all of them is four. You will note that you don't get enough points to be human-average in all ten until priority C, and that's including the (net) +1 from your race/nationality pick. There isn't even any wiggle room for like, 3 is low-average, 4 is high-average, if you look at the sample NPCs, the example peasant is working with straight 4s. You have to invest a lot of your starting resources to have more talent than some nosepick extra.

Looking at skills, the same thing is true. You're a professional at rating 7, which you don't get until priority C or higher. If you didn't rate professional, what the hell were you doing to survive before the game started? The expectation is that everyone is going to be professional at something by the time they reach adulthood, that's how society works in the bad old days when your career starts at age seven.

The philosophy presented in the actual character generation rules is that you get two picks that are 'better than average,', one that is 'average,' and three that are 'below average,' which averages out to 'below average.' Average. Even if you count Race&Sorcery F as par (which you admittedly should), you still have 2 ups, 1 even, and 2 downs, which only gets you to breaking even. Now, because you have A and B priorities, you are going to be better than average in some ways, but you are also going to be worse in some ways. And you are also probably going to be normal in at least one way, so the promise made in the intro is broken in letter as well as spirit.


Category 2: It's a Trap
This game fell square into the White Wolf hole where things are costed differently between character creation and advancement, creating an optimization problem where one PC can be straight superior to another with the same or indeed less advancement spent. It's an old and well-chewed failure point, and I don't think there's anything I can really add to it except to point out that it is also here, long after its flaws were well-understood everywhere except the retro-design-warp in which this book was made.


Honorable Mention: Social Class
In this game, your starting money pick also determines your social class, and this has effects that specifically persist long after looting and losing have washed away any monetary difference within the party. A noble has contacts and salary expectations that can be worth an enormous amount, while a prisoner/slave literally starts the first session in shackles and may be hunted by a Javert-figure for the entire campaign. It's questionable in terms of balance, but putting a focus on social class in an old-timey class-based society has a lot of roleplay value.

Next Up: Traits

[Blicero]

Is there any lingering benefit to starting as a lower social class? Like, did official adventures establish a precedent where being a prisoner would give you helpful contacts in certain circles?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Is there any lingering benefit to starting as a lower social class?

No. Or rather, not relative to having a higher social class. I mean, everyone has contacts appropriate to their circle, it's just a lot more helpful to have the ear of the local ruler than Fred of Nostril or Jack-on-the-rack. In much the same vein that everyone has thumbs, but people with better stats get more use out of them.

Like, did official adventures establish a precedent where being a prisoner would give you helpful contacts in certain circles?

There's only one official adventure, and it uses pregens, none of which are prisoners. The sort of thing you're talking about has shown up in actual play, but isn't present in the text.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So if you wanted to be a wizard, what would be the best short-term and long-term choice in terms of starting CharGen?

[angelfromanotherpin]

A in Attributes, B in Sorcery, and after that it probably doesn't much matter. You need some Vagaries, but buying those is cheap as dirt in advancement, so you could plausibly take Proficiencies/Vagaries F and then just buy a couple Vagary points out of your starting SAs to get you rolling. Most of the other things are completely irrelevant when your bread-and-butter is incomparable shit like conjuring pterodactyls.

If I'm doing this with a generic unknown group, I'd probably go:
• Gifts/Flaws C (there's some nice caster-only Gifts),
• Social Class D so there's less excuse for me to be persecuted,
• Proficencies/Vagaries E just in case the Seneschal won't let you spend SAs before the game begins, and
• Skills F because no-one cares, your profession is turning people into frogs.

...but a reasonable argument exists for almost any other distribution.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Book Three: Training



This book starts with the skill descriptions, and I'm not going to go into any depth on them. They're fucked, and not even in an interesting way. Skills have wildly different values, the descriptions are filled with fiddly exceptions and modifiers, there's almost no sense of what different margins of success or failure might mean... it's a classic rules-as-improv-prompts skill system, we see them all the time.

The Gifts and Flaws situation is similar: bad, in an ordinary and uninteresting way. A lot of the gifts are very boring bonus dice in a particular situation, and a lot of the flaws are behavior problems that seem like they'd work better as part of the Spiritual Attribute system. Some are real outliers in terms of relative value, when they can be compared. It reads like a beta document.

Then we get to the Proficiencies, the fighting methods, and you can immediately tell that this is where the author's actual interest was. There are thirteen melee Proficiencies, and each is defined with specificity, lists of combat maneuvers with specific and different use costs, and a list of defaults from each Proficiency to the others. Then there are like eight listed missile Proficiencies which get one or two lines each because the author stopped caring again.



Following that is the combat maneuver descriptions, which are once again in sharp focus. And look, if you are super-interested in a realistic blow-by-blow technical fencing combat system for your RPG: this is it. It's deep and engaging and specific and very much its own game that the player has to learn. There are bluffs and counters and strategies and forethought and traps to set and bait. When a plan comes together it's extremely satisfying.

There are two chief complaints against it:
1) It takes a lot of time to resolve.
2) An inordinate amount of PC effectiveness comes from player system mastery.

The first is true, especially compared to a simple hit-roll/damage-roll system like D&D. I will say that it gets a lot faster with familiarity, but it's never more than brisk. The second is clearly intended as a feature, and is true of many RPG systems, just at a somewhat higher level of abstraction, tactical rather than personal. I don't say anyone's wrong to not like it, but it seems like a matter of taste, not poor design. You need to be able to get real invested in the very fine details of a swordfight.

---

The last part of this book is the advancement system, which is once again fucked in an uninteresting way, chiefly the same way as White Wolf, if different in the details. Except that I'd forgotten that Skills use a different method! It looks dreadful.

Okay, every time you successfully use a skill under duress, it gets a check mark (max 3), and if you have three check marks, you roll your Mental Aptitude against a TN of (15-Skill rating). Success means your skill improves by 1 and all checks are erased, failure means two checks are erased, and fumbling means all checks are erased. Out of game, you can buy an MA roll for a flat 2 XP. It's bad in at least three different ways, all of which I've seen before, but never combined. The use-check system creates perverse incentives to do rando shit in action scenes, the roll-to-advance creates random divergence between PC abilities, and it's (mostly) orthogonal to the usual advancement currency for no apparent reason.


Next Up: Combat.

[OgreBattle]

Yeah I loved the combat maneuvers portion as RoS summed up historic european martial arts stuff and kenjutsu stuff more thoroughly than anything else I knew of at the time.

The 'simultaneous combat' and 'spend your energy pool on two exchanges, THEN it refreshes' really intrigued me.

The amount of maneuvers they got is too fiddly though and doesn't quite line up with my weapon martial arts experience. Like a lot of the time people intend to cleave each other's skulls in, but the action of both fighters attacking along the same plane means their weapons clash and they end up in a bind/grapple.

In RoS though both people doing "all in blow to head" creates a no-defense double hit or one guy gets hit first due to speed. Instead an attack that covers and attacks at the same time is a "master strike" and you need high proficiency to do that.

There's rules for what stance you're in and modifiers but... that's kinda too fiddly for how fast and varied 'real life' weapons sparring is. Their "stances simplified to offense and defense" is arguably more 'realistic' because intentions and game plan matter more than "he is holding his sword point forward in ochs". The speed of 'real life combat' is just too quick for thinking of combat as holding a static stance.

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I think the optimized way to play RoS melee duels were...

A) Do one all-in attack
B) Have enough dice left over to steal initiative if you don't have it

[angelfromanotherpin]

A) Do one all-in attack
B) Have enough dice left over to steal initiative if you don't have it

'The quick-draw' is where most people start, and is a valuable tool that can be very effective (especially if you're a genetic superman), but it's not by itself the optimized way to play. The Counter maneuver can end you. And once you start playing around Counter, the rest of the game shows up.

[Iduno]

Okay, every time you successfully use a skill under duress, it gets a check mark (max 3), and if you have three check marks, you roll your Mental Aptitude against a TN of (15-Skill rating). Success means your skill improves by 1 and all checks are erased, failure means two checks are erased, and fumbling means all checks are erased. Out of game, you can buy an MA roll for a flat 2 XP. It's bad in at least three different ways, all of which I've seen before, but never combined. The use-check system creates perverse incentives to do rando shit in action scenes, the roll-to-advance creates random divergence between PC abilities, and it's (mostly) orthogonal to the usual advancement currency for no apparent reason.

15-Skill rating? It's very good and smart that newbies are incapable of learning, and masters are very capable of improving. I realize that skill as a penalty to learning doesn't work for untrained (if you allow them to spontaneously learn things by trying), and people will mostly just stop regularly advancing halfway through the game, but one's easily fixable and one is true of most advancement systems. It's not a good system either direction, but it's worse this way. Snowballing systems increase inequality, which isn't fun in the game any more than it is in real life.